Five College Women's Research Studies Center getting new director

Submitted PhotoKaren Remmler, professor of German studies, critical social thought, and gender studies at Mount Holyoke College, has been chosen to serve a three-year term as the director of the Five College Women's Research Studies Center beginning this fall.

SOUTH HADLEY—The incoming director of the Five College Women’s Research Studies Center would like the center to be a place for lively exchange and the development of concrete approaches to bringing women’s voices into public arenas and the media.

Karen Remmler, professor of German studies, critical social thought and gender studies at Mount Holyoke College, has been chosen to serve a three-year term as the director of the center at the college beginning this fall.

Founded in 1991 on the interests and strengths of some 350 women’s studies scholars at the member campuses of the Five College Consortium, the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center offers regular programming of speakers, symposia and discussion groups.

The center also encourages critical feminist scholarship from diverse perspectives by hosting as many as 18 associates for up to eight months each year.

The center has hosted more than 300 scholars from 28 states and 44 countries.

“Issues facing women today include inequity in employment, rights and access to education across the globe, to name a few,” Remmler said. “Researchers and visitors to the center have the opportunity to share work in progress, to produce material that addresses these issues and others from global and local perspectives.”

Based in Amherst, Five Colleges Inc., is a non-profit educational consortium created in 1965 to advance the extensive educational and cultural objectives of its member institutions—Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke and Smith colleges and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Remmler, who has taught at Mount Holyoke since 1990 and will continue teaching with a reduced course load, has focused much of her research on German Jewish women writers and the politics and gender of memory in the aftermath of atrocity.

She helped design a new gender studies department at Mount Holyoke. Gender issues, she said, are relevant just as are issues of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability and “all categories of identity.”

Remmler, 53, earned a doctorate in German Literature from Washington University in St. Louis in 1989, a master’s in German from that university in 1981 and a bachelor’s degree in sociology and German from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1979.

She has been a full professor at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley from 2003 and was co-director of the Weissman Center for Leadership at Mount Holyoke from 2000-2005. She has served as both associate and assistant professor at Mount Holyoke and as an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

She sees students transform their liberal arts education into projects, jobs and further study with an intention and commitment toward improving the lives of all people.

“They do so with the theoretical foundation and practical skills necessary to make sense out of a very complex and increasingly unpredictable global situation,” she said. “Work in gender and women’s studies spans all fields and raises questions in all walks of life about inequities perpetuated by discriminatory practices.

At the same time, the multiple experiences and resources affecting women require different approaches, creative alliances and resolve that varies from culture to culture, from geopolitical crisis to another.”

Remmler emphasized that all women are not facing the same issues and that particular experiences in a particular place and time must be contextualized.

“At the same time, women earn less for the same work, tend to be more easily displaced and face more violence to person and property than most men,” she said. Some face issues of freedom of speech, reproductive rights, freedom to own property, access and means to justice and economic inequality. Yet “women have power too,” she said, pointing to German Chancellor Angela D. Merkel and U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton.

By working closely with Five College Executive Director Neal Abraham and the deans of the five campuses, Remmler—of South Hadley—said she will ensure that initiatives engendered throughout the Five Colleges could lead to more direct involvement with the center and with the diverse group of faculty colleagues, students and staff members with foci in women’s and gender studies.

Remmler is the author of Waking the Dead: Correspondences between Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Remembrance and Ingeborg Bachmann’s “Way’s of Dying” and the coeditor, with Sander Gilman, of Reemerging Jewish Culture in Germany: Life and Literature since 1989.

In 2002, she co-edited, with Leslie Morris, the anthology Contemporary Jewish Writing in Germany. With Mount Holyoke English Professor Christopher Benfey, Remmler co-edited Artists, Intellectuals, and World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942-1944.

Among Remmler’s fields of research and teaching are contemporary culture in Germany and Austria, the memory of the Holocaust in film and literature, Jewish German relations in post-Wall Berlin, contemporary literature by Jewish and German women writers living in Germany and the politics of memory and space in present-day Berlin. Her work combines training in German literature and language, critical social thought, gender studies and Jewish studies.